Outdoor Sports Rescue Shaming

One of the issues that I’ve seen in outdoor sports and one that bothers me is rescue shaming. That is the tendency of people to make fun of someone who almost dies while doing an outdoor sport. As an example, back in November, people on social media were making fun of a day hiker who almost died in the Colorado mountains and needed rescue. It’s easy to look at these rescues from the outside and criticize the person, but it’s not a good way to approach rescues.

Cognitive Biases and Decision Heuristics

In outdoor recreation, like in other activities, participants often suffer from cognitive biases, and those biases unless known and accounted for during decision making can lead to adverse consequences. This is even true for experienced people. For illustrative purposes, I’m going to include several. Keep in mind that there are many more.

The first comes from a discussion about this topic with Nick Schade. Nick is the founder of Guillemot Kayaks. He designs boats and builds them in cedar strip. His book is excellent. He mentioned FACETS, which is an acronym that stands for familiarity, acceptance, commitment, expert halo, tracks/scarcity, and social facilitation. This acronym evolved from a study by Ian McCammon called Heuristic Traps in Recreational Avalanche Accidents: Evidence and Implications. It’s used in avalanche safety training. While all the points may or may not transfer directly to accidents in paddling, it illustrates the types of cognitive biases that outdoor recreationalists face, including those who are skilled in the outdoors.

These heuristics are shortcuts our minds take while making decisions, and most of the time these shortcuts allow us to live our daily lives without having to weigh all the variables we would have to in order to make every decision every single moment of our lives. In other words, heuristics allow us to live our workaday lives without becoming overwhelmed by nonstop decisions. But in the outdoors, these same shortcuts that allow us to live day-to-day can become deadly.

FACETS

The below quotes are taken from the paper and help explain the FACETS acronym. The italiced paragraphs are my thoughts or comments.

Familiarity

The familiarity heuristic relies on our past actions to guide our behavior in familiar settings. Rather than go through the trouble of figuring out what is appropriate every time, we simply behave as we have before in that setting.

To put a statistic with this. 69% of avalanche accidents were on slopes that the skier was very familiar with.

Acceptance

The acceptance heuristic is the tendency to engage in activities that we think will get us noticed or accepted by people we like or respect, or by people who we want to like or respect us. We are socialized to this heuristic from a very young age

Consistency/Commitment

Once we have made an initial decision about something, subsequent decisions are much easier if we simply maintain consistency with that first decision. This strategy, known as the consistency heuristic, saves us time because we don’t need to sift through all the relevant information with each new development. Instead, we just stick to our original assumptions about the situation.

You can think of this one as summit fever. If people make a goal and commit to it, they are more likely to believe that since they’ve already gone so far it’s best to finish. Basically, we want to be consistent in the outdoors in the same way we want to be consistent with our beliefs, etc.

Expert Halo

In many recreational accident parties, there is an informal leader who, for various reasons, ends up making critical decisions for the party. Sometimes their leadership is based on knowledge and experience in avalanche terrain; sometimes it is based on simply being older, a better rider, or more assertive than other group members. Such situations are fertile ground for the expert halo heuristic, where an overall positive impression of the leader within the party leads them to ascribe avalanche skills to that person that they may not have.

Tracks/Scarcity

The scarcity heuristic is the tendency to value resources or opportunities in proportion to the chance that you may lose them, especially to a competitor (Cialdini, 2001). Those familiar with the “powder fever” that descends on recreationists after a big winter storm have seen this heuristic in action, as individuals take seemingly disproportionate risks to be the first to access untracked snow.

Social Facilitation

Social facilitation is a decisional heuristic where the presence of other people enhances or attenuates risk taking by a subject, depending on the subject’s confidence in their risk taking skills. In other words, when a person or group is confident in their skills, they will tend to take more risks using those skills when other people are present than they would when others are absent.

The way to think about this is if you see a bunch of people out surfing, you’d have a tendency to believe it was safe to go join them. The paper suggests this is more common among trained groups of three or four.

Dunning-Kruger Effect

The next and last cognitive bias I’ll list is common in outdoor recreation and paddle sports. When I was first getting into paddle sports, I have no doubt that I suffered from it. It’s the Dunning-Kruger Effect. This is a cognitive bias caused by a lack of knowledge. It makes people think that they’re more skilled than they are.

As an example, day hiking generally seems safe and easy and that is a message that’s reinforced often in the media and advertisements (also see acceptance above). So, casual hikers don’t think there will be an issue or danger on a day hike, and due to suffering from a cognitive bias they believe that they are skilled enough to handle these hikes. They don’t understand the risks associated with traveling in the mountains, and because of the cognitive bias that they’re suffering from they can get into trouble.

If they do get in trouble, the media has a heyday over it, and the Internet blames the person instead of the bias. But you don’t know what you don’t know, and with D-K, education is key. Because with education, the person will often realize how unskilled they actually are and seek out training. This was likely in play in the above cited mountain rescue–the one that had people on the internet making fun of the guy.

The Majority If Not All Outdoor Enthusiasts Suffer from Cognitive Biases

The kicker is that the majority of casual outdoor enthusiasts likely suffer from some cognitive biases and use the same decision heuristics, and they have been lucky enough in the past that they didn’t end up in a similar bad situation. I’m sure some of the same people making fun of the person who needed rescued suffer from Dunning-Kruger. It’s most likely that they do, because they wouldn’t make the same decision about insulting the person who was rescued if they understood the problems. It’s a defect of the human brain to suffer cognitive biases that lead to bad decisions, and everyone who participates in the outdoors needs to account for that in their decision making.

As far as rescues, when you hear about a rescue don’t make fun of the person. The best response to hearing about rescues is to emphasize the dangers and educate people on how to avoid those dangers. This approach helps people break out of any biases that they may be stuck in and will make the outdoors a safer and more welcoming space.